The Girl He'd Overlooked

by Cathy Williams

  James, who had had no real idea of what Jennifer did in Paris, had only known that whatever she did, she did extremely well, was impressed by the depth of her knowledge and the incisiveness of her ideas. She also knew all the legal ins and outs should this small arm of his publishing firm decide to break away. He found himself listening to her with interest and when, pink cheeked, she finally rounded up her rousing argument for not trying to force them to fit into a prescribed mould, he nodded slowly and frowned.

  ‘Very good,’ he said slowly, and she flushed with pleasure. ‘So you think I should stop trying to close this minor arm of the business and let the employees do their own thing?’

  ‘Not do their own thing,’ Jennifer said, ‘but with someone good in charge, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that there’s room in this computerised world of ours to accommodate things that don’t want to or can’t be computerised. There are still people out there with a love of old things and we should encourage that.’

  ‘And what would you say if I told you that I have just the person for that job in mind?’

  ‘Have you? I guess I always thought that the people who work for you were bright young things who wouldn’t want to get tied up with something they might see as old-fashioned.’

  ‘Oh, some of the bright young things could be easily persuaded into tying themselves into something old-fashioned if the pay was right. Money is always the most effective arm twister.’

  ‘Ye-es…’ She dragged out that single syllable as she thought about what he said. ‘But you also need someone who’s really interested in what they’re doing and not doing it just because the pay cheque at the end of the month is fat.’

  ‘The person I have in mind is bright, passionate and would do a damn good job.’

  ‘That’s brilliant. Well… enough of me spouting my opinions. Do you feel a little less frustrated now or am I going to hear that gardening book hit the ground again? Not that I mind, but maybe you could give me a little advance warning so that I don’t jump out of my skin when I happen to be holding a knife about to chop something up for our dinner!’ She began standing up and he waved her back down.

  ‘I like you spouting your opinions,’ he said, which made her flush with pleasure again. ‘The girl I knew just used to hang onto mine.’

  And the guy I knew and with whom I was so infatuated never encouraged me to have my own…

  The shift in their relationship now stared her in the face. Two adults finding ground that was equal, so different from what they once had, so different and so much more rewarding.

  From nowhere floated those little words he had said when she had still been fighting him, still trying to prove to him how little he meant to her…

  You’re a sexy woman. Her heart skipped a beat and her skin began to tingle. He might respect her opinions, she thought, but that didn’t mean that he had suddenly stopped seeing her as the girl next door. This time, when she tried to dredge up the hurt she felt she had suffered at his hands all those years ago, it eluded her. It was in the process of being replaced by something else. For the very first time, she thought back to that night and tried to see herself through his eyes. Young, naive, infatuated, gullible. What a poor proposition. She shook her head, clearing it of the muddle of thoughts now released to show themselves.

  ‘I know. How boring for you.’

  ‘Boring… never…’

  ‘Who,’ she said hurriedly, because that thoughtful look in his eyes was doing all sorts of weird things to her, ‘do you have in mind for this job, then? And do you think he’ll like being taken away from what he’s doing to head up something that might not be a profitable concern?’

  ‘It’s a she…’

  All at once Jennifer’s overactive imagination, the very one she had tried to subdue, was back in play, throwing up images of a little blonde thing, cute and brainy, simpering and doing whatever was asked of her. One of his loyal employees, like his secretary only much younger and not married.

  ‘The only fly in the ointment,’ James said, watching her very carefully and marvelling at the fact that she still didn’t seem to have a clue where this conversation was leading, ‘is that she doesn’t actually work for my company.’

  ‘She doesn’t?’

  ‘Nope. In fact, she doesn’t even work in the country.’ He let those words pool in silence between them and smiled as it began to dawn on her that he was asking her to work for him.

  ‘I can’t work for you, James!’

  ‘Why not? You said yourself that you were thinking of returning to England, that your father is getting older and will need you around more than he has done… Have you changed your mind about that?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘And this isn’t a job offered to you out of charity. You talked yourself into it, as a matter of fact. Everything you said is spot on. It’ll be the biggest challenge of your life and I guarantee you’ll love every second of it.’

  ‘Surely you have people within your company who are more qualified for the position.’

  ‘None as passionate as you and certainly none with the required experience in dealing with a tiny, stubborn company that refuses to shift with the times.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say…’

  ‘Then think about it.’ He closed his eyes and listened to her soft breathing. ‘Now what were you saying about that exciting meal you were going to prepare for me…?’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I NEVER said that it was going to be exciting…’

  ‘And you’ll give some consideration to my offer while you cook…’

  ‘Are you sure you’re being serious about this, James? You’ve never worked with me. I don’t want you to get back to London and realise that you did the wrong thing because you weren’t in your normal surroundings. I can’t afford to jack my job in to discover that you’ve made a mistake.’

  ‘I never make mistakes.’

  ‘And you’re never laid up, yet here you are. Laid up.’

  ‘Do you ever do anything without putting up an argument?’ But his slow smile addled her. ‘I mean it. You’d be perfect for the job. You can join that little team and you can all argue together about the ills of capitalism and big conglomerates wiping out small concerns.’

  ‘Is that what they’ve been saying to you?’ She grinned, liking the sound of that team already.

  ‘Something like that. I’ve never met a more stubborn bunch of people. They’ve been allowed to be fully self-accounting, thanks to their very woolly-headed, charming, eighty-two-year-old boss and, now that they face the threat of being held to account, they refuse to surrender. I think one of them may have said something along the lines of they’ll go down fighting. None of them have realised that they’ve already been taken over and they don’t have much choice but to get with the programme.’

  ‘But you’re not hard-hearted enough to force them.’

  ‘Like I said, a disgruntled employee is worse than no employee at all.’

  Her heart flipped over. James Rocchi might be powerful and ruthless, but he was also fair-minded and sympathetic. He was all those things she had always seen under the surface.

  ‘And what about their eighty-two-year-old boss? Did they feel betrayed that he’d sold them out?’

  ‘It wasn’t a hostile takeover,’ James said. ‘Far from it. Edward Cable was a friend of my father’s even though he was considerably older. He came to me for a rescue bid. One of the big publishing houses wanted them. They were a failing company but he was reluctant to sell out to someone who would pick them apart and throw aside the bits they didn’t want without thought to the employees. I have next to no experience with publishing companies and no desire to add one to my stable but…’

  ‘But you felt you had to do the decent thing.’

  ‘Perhaps it was my sensitive, feminine side coming out…’

  Jennifer wished he would stop doing that, making her laugh, making her see him as the three-dimensional man she had n
ever glimpsed as a young girl.

  ‘Edward was extremely grateful to me and I could afford to buy him out. In actual fact, like I said, the company has a lot of promise. There’s enough there for them to carry that little wayward arm of their company which is what I suspect he’s been doing all these years.’

  ‘Then why the need to sell?’

  ‘Because they were making less and less money and he’s never had a family. No children to inherit. A family business in a fast-moving world that doesn’t have much time for family businesses unless they’re incredibly well run with top-of-the-range IT departments that can take them into the twenty-first century.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ She stood up, flexed her legs and headed out to the kitchen with a lot on her mind.

  Should she take a job that would require her to work for James? If that had been suggested when she had been in Paris, hunkered down with him out of sight, she would have run a mile from the idea, but out here, forced to face him once again, she was discovering that he was not the bad guy of her imagination. And the job sounded as though it could be fun. In fact, it sounded like a job that would be right up her street. Should she turn it down because it involved James? Should she let pride get in the way of a good deal?

  She prepared a meal on autopilot. They were now running out of fresh vegetables and, with the snow still falling and no idea when she would next be seeing a shop, she made do with tinned vegetables. Her father’s larder was well stocked. It was the sort of larder that would keep a small family in food for weeks in the event of a nuclear fall-out.

  She was busily opening a can when she heard James’s deep velvety voice at the door and she started and spun round to see him lounging indolently against the doorframe. Immediately her body went into overdrive. How was it that he was capable of dominating the space around him so that it was impossible to remain detached?

  ‘I’ve come to lend a hand.’ He pushed himself away from the door and sauntered into the kitchen to peer over her shoulder. ‘What feast are you preparing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He picked up the recipe book that she was following in a half-hearted way and scrutinised it, reciting the ingredients and then checking them off on what he could spy on the counter.

  Up close and personal, his presence next to her was making it impossible to think straight and she snatched the recipe book from his hands.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be in here!’ she informed him. ‘You’re supposed to be out there. Working. I put a lot of effort in dragging my dressing table downstairs for you because you couldn’t possibly make do with the sofa and the coffee table.’

  ‘Now you make me sound fussy.’

  Her eyes slid over to where he was picking up one of the onions, which he began to peel.

  ‘You are fussy,’ Jennifer grumbled. ‘Most people would have made do.’

  ‘These things are fiddly.’

  ‘Have you never peeled an onion before?’

  ‘Look at me and tell me what you think.’

  Jennifer glanced at him. His eyes were watering and he wiped one with the back of his hand.

  ‘You’re the only woman who can make me cry like this,’ he murmured. She felt warm colour flood her cheeks while she mentally slapped herself on the wrist because he was just teasing her. He’d always enjoyed teasing her. He had once told her that he liked to see her blush. Now that she had stopped sniping at him, he was once again comfortable teasing her. Still, she looked away abruptly and told him not to be silly, to leave the wretched onion alone, that too many cooks spoiled the broth…

  ‘Ah, but many hands make light work,’ he quipped, carrying on with the task, ‘and it’s only fair that we both share the cooking duties. Besides, it gives me an opportunity to try and persuade you to work for me. I want to lock you up and throw away the key before you have time to consider other options.’

  ‘It’s tempting,’ Jennifer admitted. ‘But I don’t want to have anyone think that I got a job because of my connections to you. It wouldn’t feel right and it would compromise my working conditions. There’s such a thing as office politics, although you probably don’t know that because you’re the head of the pile.’

  ‘I’d be your boss on paper but in reality you’d report through a different chain of command. The company isn’t even lodged in my head office. They’re housed in an old Victorian building in West London, far from the madding crowd, and I shall let them continue to lease the premises. Makes more sense than dragging them into central London. So you’d be far away from me.’

  He’d moved on to the peppers and was making short work of cutting them into strips. He was quick but untidy. He was a typical male with a cavalier approach to food preparation. Bits of discarded pepper were flicked into the sink or else accidentally brushed onto the ground. He might be helping but she would spend an hour afterwards cleaning up behind him. Instead of finding the prospect of that frustrating, she had to conceal a smile of indulgence. God, what was happening to her? Were her brains in the process of being scrambled like the eggs she had cooked for him the day before?

  ‘I don’t know how much notice I would have to give my boss in Paris.’ She was determined to ignore the increasingly potent effect he was having on her. ‘It’s usually one month but they’ve been very good to me and I wouldn’t want to leave them in the lurch.’

  ‘Naturally.’ He looked around for something else to chop and decided to avoid the mushrooms, which looked grubby. Giving up on his good deed, he washed his hands and moved on to the less onerous task of pouring them both something to drink. A glass of wine. Rules of normality were suspended out here, so why not? He leaned against the counter and watched as she started putting things together. She didn’t try and impress him with her culinary skills. Twice she apologised in advance for something she was sure would taste pretty appalling. She ignored the scales and the measuring cup. She was a breath of fresh air.

  He didn’t like women who went out of their way to try and impress him. He had fallen victim once, many years ago, to a woman’s wiles and he had vowed never to repeat the mistake. He never had. Nothing was as off-putting as the woman who wanted to display her culinary talent. Behind that, he could always read the unspoken text. Let me show you what a good catch I am and then maybe we could start talking about the next stage.

  For James, there was never a next stage. At least not in the foreseeable future. He supposed that one day he would start thinking about settling down, but he would recognise that day when and if it came, and so far it was nowhere on his horizon.

  ‘And then there’s the question of leaving your friends behind.’ He sipped his wine and resisted the temptation to brush that wayward tendril of hair from her cheek.

  ‘I think we’ll all make the effort to keep in touch,’ Jennifer said drily. She looked at her concoction and hoped for better things when it had done its time in the oven. For the moment, there was nothing else to add and she began tidying the counters, nudging him out of the way and allowing him to press the glass of wine into her hand.

  James wanted to ask her how much she would miss the French fedora man but he couldn’t work out how to introduce him into the conversation. Nor could he quite understand why he was bothered by the thought of her ex-boyfriend, anyway. She suddenly turned to him and he flushed to have been caught staring at her.

  ‘So I’m assuming you’re on board…’

  ‘Yes.’ She made her mind up. She wasn’t going to let a once-in-a-lifetime prospect slip away from her for the wrong reasons. She wasn’t going to let the past dictate the present or the future. ‘I’m on board. Of course, I’ll have to hear the complete package.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that it will be a generous one. Shame we have no champagne. We could have cracked a bottle open to celebrate.’

  Jennifer wasn’t sure of the wisdom of that. Alcohol, James and her increasingly confusing emotions didn’t make good bedfellows. With the cooking out of the way, she edged to one of t
he kitchen chairs, sat down and watched him there by the kitchen sink, sipping his wine and contemplating her over the rim of his glass.

  ‘And I expect you’ll turn this down, but there will always be a company flat for you to stay in, should you choose.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ve turned it down. Ellie… my friend in London… I’ve maintained the rent on a room in her house. I always knew that I’d be back in London and it’s there, waiting for me.’ She wondered what his place was like. Did he live in a house? An apartment? She wanted the background pieces to slot together so that the picture in her head could be more complete. What did that mean?

  ‘Do you know—’ she laughed lightly ‘—that I don’t actually know where you live in London?’

  ‘Kensington.’ And you could have known, James thought, if you had kept in touch. He pictured her in his sprawling apartment, wrestling with a cookery book and trying to turn a recipe into something appetising. He pictured her with a glass of wine in her hand, laughing that rich, full-throated laughter. The image was so sudden, so unexpected, that he shook his head to clear it and frowned.

  ‘How lovely.’ That slight frown reminded her that perhaps she was being nosy.

  ‘Well, it’s big although I’m not sure you would find it lovely.’ What would she look like sitting across from him at his dinner table? With her elbows resting on the glass surface? Laughing?

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s very modern and I know you’ve never liked modern things.’

  ‘I could have changed.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Not that much,’ she admitted, swirling the drink in her glass and then taking a sip. ‘That’s one reason why I’ve continued to rent the room in Ellie’s house. I love where it’s located and I love the fact that it’s small and cosy and Victorian. There’s a garden and in summer it’s absolutely beautiful.’

  James thought that she would have loathed the company flat, which was modelled along the lines of his own apartment, although half the size. Pale walls, pale wooden flooring, pale furniture, abstract paintings on the walls, high-tech kitchen with all mod cons known to mankind.